BERLIN, GERMANY: A woman arranges a shelf with hundreds of beer bottles on the stand of German Brewers federation presenting 580 brands of beer, 15 January 2004 in Berlin one day before the opening of the 'Green week', the 69th International Agricultural fair to be held from 16 to 25 January 2004. Some 450,000 people are expected to visit the show. AFP PHOTO DDP/FABIAN MATZERATH GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read FABIAN MATZERATH/AFP/Getty Images)

When’s the last time you walked into a bar and ordered a beer by the name of the yeast that generated its carbonation and alcohol? Right. Probably never. But Chris White, president and CEO of White Labs in San Diego, hopes you might someday. While hops tend to enjoy the most sex appeal among craft beer consumers, White, whose international company cultivates and stores yeast for breweries and other food manufacturers, is trying to get the beer-drinking public to better understand and value his product.

Anyone can swing by White’s tasting rooms to sample beers brewed in-house (with yeast strains prominently displayed), and the company’s education and engagement curator spends a good bit of his time at bars and restaurants teaching front-of-house employees to identify and explain the many ways yeast influences a beer’s aroma and flavor. His goal: to have them share that knowledge and excitement with patrons. But considering White only sells yeast to commercial entities and homebrewers, wouldn’t getting a mass market on board seem a little unnecessary?

Not at all, White says. In a landscape where even brewers haven’t quite developed a strong vocabulary to describe the vast universe of yeast, he wants public buy-in to help drinkers better appreciate and articulate the most complex and mysterious of the beer ingredients that his customers are using.

“I’ve never been too worried about giving people too much information,” he says. “Within 30 seconds you know what yeast tastes like but I could explain it for an hour and you may never understand. That can help more people make or demand better beer and lead to new business in ways we don’t know of yet.”

White started its public-facing education efforts about five years ago, and he’s finding increasing numbers of breweries and ingredient suppliers engaging in similar pursuits. Though some might prefer to spend all of their time pitching their own products, those who take this approach find that bringing craft drinkers into the overall process proves almost as valuable. Call it product education over brand promotion.

St. Louis-- SMASH Pack of Schlafly beers to showcase different hop varieties.

Schlafly Beer

“I suppose it doesn’t (ultimately matter) as long as they give us their money,” jokes Stephen Hale, head brewer at Schlafly Beer in St. Louis, which is formally launching a website Tuesday to complement its interactive “Hop Trials” experimental hop program this month.

Though for some years breweries have showcased the influence of individual hop varieties by releasing “SMASH” (single malt and single hop) beers, this style is currently surging in popularity, and breweries like Schlafly are taking to the next level.

St. Louis -- Schlafly Beer Hop Trial evaluation card.

Credit: Schlafly Beer

The Hop Trial website provides detailed information about specific hops, grower biographies and places where users can evaluate the hop if they’ve tried it. The site builds onto the existing program, which includes the second annual SMASH four-pack hitting the market the week of August 14 with different hop strains than last year, in addition to the base Hop Trial draft program itself. Through this unique campaign, Schlafly brews a rotating selection of small-batch SMASH beers for sale at its two brewpubs, with nine beers – highlighting unusual hops like Lemon Drop, X331, Bullion, Relax, and Monroe -- scheduled for 2017. Each drinker gets a comment card that asks her to provide feedback on the hop and scale it for its level of resin, spice, floral and fruit notes. The brewery crew posts the card on a Hop Trial board and shares interesting feedback with the farmers.

Despite savvy craft beer drinkers already knowing the basics of hop usage, Hale says his patrons have a good time with their “task.”

“It sets you on a fun research expedition. When you want to change your clothes hops are like the jewelry, the accoutrements, the bling. The hops really add the je ne sais quois, the fairy dust and the sprinkle,” he says.

AB InBev contract barley grower Clark Hamilton holding a stalk.

Sarah Rutledge Fischer

Even Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), viewed by many as a practitioner of anti-competitive sales strategies, is spending millions of dollars to forgo some of its brand-centric advertising to promote malt, specifically, and beer in general. The world’s most powerful brewery has just soft-launched a website called “The Beer Necessities” being edited by accomplished beer journalist Ethan Fixell that will dedicate a minority of its content to AB InBev holdings and the remainder to everyone else.

“There are a lot of great sites devoted to very educated beer nerds but that’s not what we’re going for,” says Fixell. “We’ll bridge the gap between beer experts and beer novices … (with a) very inclusive publication that’s beer positive and trying to get people excited about beer.”

“Whether it is dark or light, foreign or domestic, macro or micro, we at Anheuser-Busch love all things beer and want to share that excitement with you,” reads the “About” section of Let’s Grab a Beer. And elsewhere on the site, captioning a video shot in a barley field that supplies AB InBev, “Before your beer is brewed, it’s grown. Right here.”

An maltster at AB InBev's Idaho Falls, Idaho, malting facility holds wet barley kernels over water used for steeping.

Sarah Rutledge Fischer

While ingredient-based education might be good for some feel-good marketing opportunities, practitioners do consider it a contemporary necessity. Craft beer drinkers and millennials are notoriously fickle, flitting from one new beer and brewery (or band or clothing label or toothpaste) to the next. So it hardly pays to focus on fostering brand loyalty when the impact may be minimal. Instead, advocates rationalize, it makes more sense to teach drinkers the story of beer in the hopes that they’ll drink more of it overall.

The tactic also reflects the way millennials like to engage with the companies they patronize. A report by Diageo called the “Future of Socializing” summarizes that this generation prefers to interact with a brand through experiential contact, and they enjoy learning about how things work and how that applies to them.

We find a perfect example at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, where twice a week brand owner Diageo invites the public in to try early batches of experimental brews and offer their feedback and vote in conversations with brewers.

In the report, the company writes, “For us, collaboration and immersive socialising are combining at the product development stage.”

Ray Daniels, creator of the vaunted Cicerone Certification Program, explains that as consumers grow more hip to what’s in their food and how it’s made, even “big guys” like Guinness and Budweiser realize they’d better step up their game.

“Even really large breweries have realized this is what consumers are interested in now and they’re catering to that,” he says. “’We’d better make our sales people smarter because they can’t answer the questions people are asking.’”

Daniels says the premiumization of coffee provided the catalyst for this century’s interest in food and that beer is “just part of the spectrum.”

Just as industry observers predict that converted craft beer drinkers will never return to the bland macro stuff from whence they came, it’s likely that beer-based branding is here to stay. And if you don’t like it, you can cry into your White Labs wheat ale brewed with your pick of yeast strain WLP011, WLP300, WLP320 or WLP380.